If you’re a Windows developer keen to start tapping into the GPU to get a big boost in your application performance, then today is a good day.

This morning we released NVIDIA Parallel Nsight 1.0 Standard, the industry’s first development environment for GPU-accelerated applications that work with Microsoft Visual Studio. Parallel Nsight has been in beta since January and if you were one of the 8000 beta developers who gave us feedback during this time, we’d like to say a big thank you for all your great input.

It’s through your support that Parallel Nsight 1.0 Standard is ready for download today here, and is available to all Visual Studio developers free of charge.

Parallel Nsight has a ton of great functionality, such as allowing developers to debug CUDA C/C++, or DirectCompute applications on the GPU using the same familiar tools and techniques as on the CPU. Parallel Nsight is also the premier environment for graphics development, delivering the DirectX 11 tools required by graphics developers to efficiently develop top game titles and visual computing applications.

Anton Kaplanyan, lead researcher at CryTek, the developer that brought you Crysis and Far Cry, had this to say: “Parallel Nsight is the first toolbox in the world that allows us to look under the hood of the GPU, and makes parallel debugging not only possible but pleasant, significantly accelerating DirectX 11 development.”

George Tang, vice president and general manager of the Video and Home entertainment group at ArcSoft said that “NVIDIA Parallel Nsight has become our daily development tool when working with our CUDA-based applications such as SimHD and H.264 encoder.”

As always, we want to hear your feedback so that we can continue to produce the highest quality developer tools. For this reason, if you are a member of the Parallel Nsight Beta Program, your premium support account will remain active and you can continue to give us feedback via the Parallel Nsight Development Community Forums. And if you're joining us at the upcoming GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, CA, we'll also be hosting in-depth Parallel Nsight tutorial sessions. Happy Developing!

With this release, we now offer two versions of Parallel Nsight:- 1.0 Standard (no cost): Includes the CUDA C Debugger, Shader Debugger, and Graphics Inspector.- 1.0 Professional (Release Candidate 2): Includes the Analyzer, and CUDA C data breakpoints.

Getting the build:You can grab the build from the Parallel Nsight Developer Zone page.Follow the instructions on the download page to download and then activate your build.

For a limited time, we are offering FREE time-limited licenses of Parallel Nsight 1.0 Professional (Release Candidate 2). More information on getting a free Pro license is available on the download page.

Features:

CUDA C Debugger:* Source debugging on the GPU hardware of CUDA C code.* Supports the CUDA 3.0 and 3.1 toolkits* Use breakpoints and single stepping to debug your code* Use Locals, Watches, and Memory window to inspect variables and data on your GPU while debugging* Use conditional breakpoints to break on a particular block and thread.* (Pro only) Use data breakpoints to stop on a memory write to a particular memory region.

Direct3D Shader Debugger:* Supports debugging HLSL shaders in programs using Microsoft Direct3D 11, 10.1 and 10* Pixel, vertex, geometery, hull and domain shaders are all supported.* Use Locals, Watches, and Memory window to inspect data on your GPU while debugging* Use conditional breakpoints to break on a particular pixel

Direct3D Graphics Inspector:* Support for applications using Microsoft Direct3D 11, 10.1 and 11* Capture a frame for inspection at any time.* Scrub through all draw calls to see how your frame was built.* Examine all textures, render targets and GPU pipeline state in the frame.* Use pixel history to see all draw calls that wrote to a pixel location.* Resume your live application at any time! No need for lengthy capture => analyze => re-run app workflows.* Frame Profiler - get per-draw call hardware bottleneck information for the ultimate in rendering optimization.